Engineering a
While usually under the purview of an Environmental Health & Safety department,
A
What’s the Facilities Guy’s view of the
role of the engineering professional
on safety?
“For safety is not a gadget but a state
of mind.” ~Eleanor Everet
Today’s controlled environments present an obstacle course
of varied safety challenges for the facilities professional ranging
from the benign to the life threatening. The program to manage
these assorted challenges must match that diversity—
demanding utilization of your engineering skills but also your people
skills, your training skills, and your management skills. While
the storage and utilization of hazardous production materials
is an exercise in engineering, it’s usually during use that these
materials intersect with the “wildcard” that is the root of most
unwanted emissions, spills, releases, and toxic reactions: the
human factor. But it’s also important to keep the risk in perspective. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tripping and falling cause three times more workplace injuries than
harmful substances.
At the same time, let’s not underestimate the potential
severity of safety issues in the controlled environment. A
review of controlled environment workplace deaths in the past
decade reveal causal factors that no lab or clean manufacturing
facilities professional wants to deal with including explosions,
fire, electrocution, poisoning, radiation, equipment malfunctions, and assorted viral and bacterial infections.
In this month’s column, we’ll travel outside the comfort
zone of engineering and algorithms to look at managing the
less precise people and process side of safety. “There is more to
heaven and earth, Horatio”… than your MSDS data bank. So
we’ll leave discussions about HPM engineering, process piping, fume hoods, etc. to another column.
Richard Bilodeau, PE
Director of Engineering, SMRT
Andover, Mass. : Q:
People always, engineering sometimes
No matter how precisely engineered a lab, cleanroom, dry
room, vivarium, or other controlled environment may be,
people are the catalyst that makes it function. And it’s people
that introduce the most significant risk into your planning and
design efforts. Given that, today’s facilities professional needs
to think beyond engineering and engage in the design and
development of standards, processes, and procedures to ensure
the safe and uninterrupted operation of the facility. Further,
the facilities professional needs to ensure that proper training
protocols and procedures are instituted and remain vibrant.
